At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we
rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought it too
thatched and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not now say that
there were vermin in the straw roof), and accepted the hospitality of
a pastry-cook’s shop. We felt the more at home with the kind woman
who kept it because she had a brother at Chicago in the employ of the
Pinkerton Detective Agency, and had once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this
doubly satisfied us as cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and
she testified to a great prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population
of Liverpool; besides, she sent us to a church of the Crusaders at
Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not find it. We
found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby is named, and
this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at the intersection of
the streets in what seemed the fragment of a village, not yet lost in
the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the simple neighborhood,
so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long, long minute till the
tram came by and took us back into the loud, hard heart of Liverpool.
I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than the
hearts of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from the many
young couples who were out together half-holidaying in the unusually
pleasant Saturday weather. I wish their complexions had been better,
but you cannot have South-of-England color if you live as far north as
Liverpool, and all the world knows what the American color is. The young
couples abounded in the Gallery of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked
at one another instead of the pictures. The pictures might have been
better, but then they might have been worse (there being examples of
Filippo Lippi, Memmi, Holbein, and, above all, the _Dante’s Dream_ of
Rossetti); and in any case those couples could come and see them when
they were old men and women; but now they had one another in a moment of
half-holiday which could not last forever.
In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings
before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were
transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths
smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the
half-dozen groups. Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was one
perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers, and
who had more of his aspirates in the right place. Many of his hearers
were in the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his
words did their poor hearts good.
Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a
fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent
so unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in Italian. He
was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was
presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse
together concerning the English. His ideas of them were often so
parallel with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them
an improvident people. I owned that they spent much more on state, or
station, than the Americans; but we neither had any censure for them
otherwise. He was of that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to
encounter in the Latin races, and I could well wish for his further
acquaintance. His talk rapt me to far other and earlier scenes, and I
seemed to be conversing with him under a Venetian heaven, among objects
of art more convincing than the equestrian statue of the late Queen, who
had no special motive I could think of for being shown to her rightly
loving subjects on horseback. We parted with the expressed hope of
seeing each other again, and if this should meet his eye and he can
recall the pale young man, with the dark full beard, who chatted with
him between the pillars of the Piazzetta, forty years before our actual
encounter I would be glad of his address.